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Stop Listening Please, Google

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Re: Stop Listening Please, Google

#3
Can anyone (perhaps a former employee) confirm this behavior. I can’t tell if I’m imaging connections or the words spoken are being ingested by the ad machine.

It seems like a huge overreach to be listening, the microphone privilege I could see being abused for this, but it just seems so wrong.

Re: Stop Listening Please, Google

#4
I've heard this anecdote from so many people in so many different contexts that I'm beginning to get suspicious about the common "benign" explanations like graphs of friends, their interests, location tracking, etc.

Do we an in-depth analysis done somewhere that proves / disproves the theory of an actual microphone / STT being used either in Android / iOS itself or by a running app?

Re: Stop Listening Please, Google

#5
post #4

I've heard this anecdote from so many people in so many different contexts that I'm beginning to get suspicious about the common "benign" explanations like graphs of friends, their interests, location tracking, etc. Do we an in-depth analysis done somewhere that proves / disproves the theory of an actual microphone / STT being used either in Android / iOS itself or by a running app?

There's also the benign explanation of "coincidence".

Re: Stop Listening Please, Google

#6
post #4

I've heard this anecdote from so many people in so many different contexts that I'm beginning to get suspicious about the common "benign" explanations like graphs of friends, their interests, location tracking, etc. Do we an in-depth analysis done somewhere that proves / disproves the theory of an actual microphone / STT being used either in Android / iOS itself or by a running app?

There's also the benign explanation of "coincidence".

Yep. How many people talked about a song they don't like, then signed into youtube and saw... not that song, so they didn't post about it.

Re: Stop Listening Please, Google

#7
I like to refer to this system that is always listening as The Daemon because I like to assume it has a commen backend. Also lookup the book Daemon by Daniel Suarez it is pretty great

Re: Stop Listening Please, Google

#8
post #4

I've heard this anecdote from so many people in so many different contexts that I'm beginning to get suspicious about the common "benign" explanations like graphs of friends, their interests, location tracking, etc. Do we an in-depth analysis done somewhere that proves / disproves the theory of an actual microphone / STT being used either in Android / iOS itself or by a running app?

>Do we an in-depth analysis done somewhere that proves / disproves the theory of an actual microphone / STT being used either in Android / iOS itself or by a running app?

For mobile, actual voice processing (i.e., not just hotword detection) would have some kind of telltale higher-than-baseline resource consumption. Whether CPU, disk, memory, battery, or network. Processing voice has to happen somewhere, and it takes resources to either do it on-phone or ship it off elsewhere (either immediately or later).

Re: Stop Listening Please, Google

#10
post #3

Can anyone (perhaps a former employee) confirm this behavior. I can’t tell if I’m imaging connections or the words spoken are being ingested by the ad machine. It seems like a huge overreach to be listening, the microphone privilege I could see being abused for this, but it just seems so wrong.

Yes, it happens way too often to be a coincidence. I talk about different topics with friends, they end up on my Youtube feed, not sure how. But I use iphone and a mac though.
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